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What a year, huh?
In early 2023, people were struggling to keep up with the technological world. One day this thing was released, the next day a competitor came out with something else, and then you heard about something new. It was too much.
But the momentum continued for the rest of the year, and many companies made history!
2023 was definitely the year of artificial intelligence!
So let's go back over the months and recap what happened…
With ChatGPT coming to market in November 2022, talks continued into early 2023. With its continued success, Microsoft swooped in and announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI.
With a lot of buzz surrounding OpenAI's ChatGPT, people were wondering if its competitors would come out of the woodwork and hit the market. Google did exactly that with its BARD debut.
Days later, Microsoft also shook the market with its bing chatbot, in which both Microsoft and the CEO of OpenAI dived into the partnership between the two.
It's been 2 months and it seems like a lot is already happening. A limited number of people were granted access to Bard to start the Google GenAI journey. That said, it started a domino effect with Adobe introducing Firefly and Canva introducing its virtual design assistant.
OpenAI also released APIs for ChatGPT, as well as its text-to-speech model called Whisper. On March 14, OpenAI released its most advanced GPT-4 model.
A new month and more is coming from Google with the announcement of Google DeepMind, a combination of Google Research and DeepMind.
We also saw Russia's Sberbank release its rival ChatGPT technology/russias-sberbank-releases-chatgpt-rival-gigachat-2023-04-24/#:~:text=April%2024%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20Russian,the%20artificial%20intelligence%20chatbot%20race.” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>GigaChat and HuggingFace is also entering the market with the launch of an ai chatbot to rival ChatGPT called HuggingChat.
Google wanted to remain competitive and felt the pressure and announced the Bard chatbot to the public. But it seemed like they added some fuel to the GenAI fire when Microsoft revealed its first ai assistant for Windows 11.
With all this going on, you can only imagine how well NVIDIA is doing. Yes, its market capitalization exceeded technology/nvidia-sets-eye-1-trillion-market-value-2023-05-30/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>1 trillion dollars for the first timemaintaining its status as a leader in ai chips.
Speaking of chips, this same month we also experienced Elon Musk's new brain implant startup, called Neuralink, in which the company aims to create and implant ai-powered chips in people's brains. This was approved by the FDA for human trials.
Apple's Vision Pro, the ai-powered augmented reality headset, was developed to take immersive experiences to the next level.
On June 14, the European Parliament began some negotiations on the EU ai Law, with 499 votes in favor, 28 against and 93 abstentions.
With everything that has happened in the first 6 months of 2023, the world of ai looks promising. McKinsey predicted that GenAI has the potential to add ai-the-next-productivity-frontier#:~:text=Across%20the%2063%20use%20cases%20we%20analyzed%2C%20generative%20AI%20has,industry’s%20revenue%20(Exhibit%204).” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>4.4 trillion dollars in value to the global economy.
Julio kept the momentum going. Meta introduced Llama 2, an open source large language model (LLM) that was trained with a combination of publicly available data and designed to power applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other modern chatbots.
Anthropic also released Claude 2, which dethroned ChatGPT and has you shaking in your boots.
Safety around ai is becoming a popular topic as LLMs are falling left, right and center and becoming part of our everyday lives.
Microsoft announced that it will charge customers $30 per month to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, which got other organizations thinking.
Google followed suit and said it would also charge users $30 a month to use its GenAI tools in its Duet ai for Workspace. There seems to be a lot of money to be made.
OpenAI introduced custom instructions to get the most out of ChatGPT. They also introduced us to Poe, a chatbot service that allows you to use cutting-edge models such as Claude+, GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4.
There's a third of the year left and the ai is already going crazy!
Companies plan to achieve everything they can and remain competitive in GenAI. Amazon announced a ai” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>$4 billion investment in OpenAI competitor Anthropic. We also saw some interesting but strange things, for example, the ai personalities that appear in the Metas apps, such as Tom Brady and Kendall Jenner.
With a focus so far on content creation, OpenAI continues its quest to display content with a Canva plugin for ChatGPT.
We experience the Executive Order on the Safe and Trustworthy Development and Use of artificial intelligence. This was also shaking up the ai world, with CEOs, leaders and others having conflicting opinions on implementing ai systems in society.
Let's start with chatbots. Elon Musk's ai startup xAI introduced ai chatbot “Grok” AWS with the launch of Amazon Q and StabilityAI's Pika 1.0.
OpenAI also held its first developer event in November, where it delved into GPT-4 Turbo and GPT Store.
But after that it went a little crazy when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired by the board out of nowhere. Microsoft immediately offered him a job and OpenAI employees threatened to resign if Sam Altman did not return and reclaim his position as CEO. So now he's back, with some new board members and a new “watcher” role for Microsoft.
A lot of crazy so far in the last 11 months, right? We finally arrive at the end of 2023.
And just before the end of the year, Google came to shake up the market again with its family of 3 variants of great language models and ChatGPT's new rival: Gemini.
We already know that OpenAI is looking at GPT 5, 6 and 7. So let's see what January 2024 has in store for us.
Wow, what a year!
2023 has represented a significant leap in the world of ai, going beyond algorithmic and coding capabilities. We are witnessing how our daily lives can be improvised with ai systems such as chatbots and the creation of content for tasks such as marketing.
That being said, we should all look forward to what the year 2024 will bring with the integration of technology and humanity.
nisha arya is a data scientist and freelance technical writer. She is particularly interested in providing professional data science advice or tutorials and theory-based insights into data science. She also wants to explore the different ways in which artificial intelligence can benefit the longevity of human life. A great student looking to expand her technological knowledge and writing skills, while she helps guide others.